The relationship between climate and tropical cyclone formation, the characteristics of tropical cyclones in high-resolution models in the present climate and their activity in the future. The idealized experiments of the Hurricane Working Group of U.S. CLIVAR in three papers recently published.

The impact of tropical cyclones on society makes it important to understand how their characteristics might change in the future. Global climate models, also known as General Circulation Models (GCMs), are important tools for studying this problem. In a GCM, one has the ability to simulate the climate organically; if the model has sufficient resolution and physics we can explore, in particular, the behavior of tropical cyclones under different climate scenarios.
While a quantitative climate theory of tropical cyclone formation remains elusive, considerable progress has been made recently in our ability to simulate tropical cyclone climatologies and understand the relationship between climate and tropical cyclone formation. Climate models are now able to simulate a realistic rate of global tropical cyclone formation, although simulation of the Atlantic tropical cyclone climatology remains challenging.
A new paper recently published on American Meteorological Society (among the authors, the CMCC researcher E. Scoccimarro) investigates the relationship between climate and tropical cyclone formation from the idealized experiments of the Hurricane Working Group of U.S. CLIVAR (CLImate VARiability and predictability of the ocean-atmosphere system).

Moreover, the global characteristics of tropical cyclones simulated by several climate models are analyzed and compared with observations in a study recently published on Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.


The identification of tropical cyclones in model data at moderate resolution is complex, and numerous schemes have been developed for their detection. A paper focused on future tropical cyclone activity examined the influence of different tracking schemes on detected tropical cyclone activity and responses in the Hurricane Working Group experiments, that is idealized atmospheric general circulation model experiments aimed at determining and distinguishing the effects of increased sea-surface temperature and other increased CO2 effects on tropical cyclone activity.

Read the full papers:

• Walsh K.J.E., Camargo S.J., Vecchi G.A., Daloz A.S., Elsner J., Emanuel K., Horn M., Lim Y-K, Roberts M., Patricola C., Scoccimarro E. et al.:
  Hurricanes and climate: the U.S. CLIVAR working group on hurricanes
  2014, Bullettin of American Meteorological Society, doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00242.
• Shaevitz D., Camargo S.J., Sobel A.H., Jonas J.A., Kim D., Kumar A., LaRow T.E., Y-K Lim Y-K, Murakami H., Reed K., Roberts M.J., Scoccimarro E., P.L. Vidale, H. Wang, M. F. Wehner, M. Zhao, N. Henderson,
  Characteristics of tropical cyclones in high-resolution models in the present climate (open access, pdf available)
  2014, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, doi: 10.1002/2014MS000372
• Horn M., Walsh K., Zhao M., Camargo S.J., Scoccimarro E., Murakami H., Wang H., Ballinger A., Kumar A., Shaevitz D.A., Jonas J.A., Oouchi K.
  Tracking Scheme Dependence of Simulated Tropical Cyclone Response to Idealized Climate Simulations

  2014, Journal of Climate, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00200.1